Saturday, February 16, 2008

The initial promise of a blind protagonist tossed into an inbred, warped village in rural Japan and forced to confront the casual brutality that is everyday life there... has evaporated. In its place are big-eye, fat-headed kids whining about anything is possible as long as you believe and some plot about a kid forced by her grandfather to impersonate her sister after she died as a child. All of the surprising and disturbing innuendo that intrigued me so much in the beginning turned out to be me just reading into everything.

Let me spoil it. Here's what was really going on: Hinata Kagura dies as a child and her little sister, Hotaru, is forced to take her place by an abusive (and prestigious) family. They tell the village that Hotaru died. Meanwhile, the powerful Kohinata family abuses the village, taking advantage of its wealth and doing horrible things like refusing to give medicine to the poor. Hinata Kagura and Hayami Kohinata become friends - only to be torn apart when the Kaguras lead the village to overthrow the Kohinata's, burning down their houses and scattering the family. Hayami is forced to live in squalor in the woods and the townsfolk regularly abuse her, both verbally and physically. But then the Promised One shows up: the blind Hirose. The "Spirit of the Sound of Time" (who turns out to be the ghost of the real Hinata) shows up, cheerfully (and prophetically) cures his blindess and he obstinately - but passively - sets out to just make everyone get along.

Turns out there was no The Lottery or any creepy, weird small-town with some kind of brutal, human-sacrifice superstitions. Instead, we just get a grand collection of idiots who are more than willing to take the abuse and blame for things they didn't do, and a town full of people more than happy to abuse - and then just as happy to be all nice-nice once an I'm-blind-but-now-I-see hapless loser shows up and asks "Why can't we all just get along?"

Recommended only for moe-taku and anyone with an unhealthy love for insipid harem anime that have pretensions of a deeply tragic plot.

Eastern Standard magazine

These are the 4 issues of the fanzine we produced a while back (2002-2004). They're rough, but they're also the foundation for a lot of what we've built since then, including this site.
Click on the issues to bring up the full reader.
Issue 1 focused on Berserk, Jin-roh, and Asian live-action movies. It also had a memorable review of Gundress.

Issue 2 was a dissection of FLCL (it explains it all, really) and the work of Taiyo Matsumoto.